You can’t tell an editorial writer by his (or her) cover: Opinion

Thanks to LAObserved.com’s Kevin Roderick for giving us in Opinion a little comic relief from our sorrow about the imminent departure of Opinion Editor Mariel Garza.

Roderick observes that the editorial board is mostly “older white guys.” This brings to mind the last time someone drew attention to our age, ethnicity or gender.

That was a few months ago, when someone with an online column thought a feminist-sounding editorial went too far — and ripped Mariel for thinking it up. Funny, because the editorial had been proposed by and written not by Mariel but by one of us Older White Guys, and approved by the majority-OWG ed board.

I wrote about that incident before to illustrate the pluses and minuses of newspapers’ traditional policy of publishing editorials without bylines. And to show that an editorial board’s consensus on a given issue is the product of many different points of view, which may or may not correspond to individual members’ places on a demographic spectrum.

Roderick’s general point is fair: The Los Angeles News Group papers cover the United States’ most diverse region, and must produce editorials and Opinion pages that reflect that.